The urban professionals who transformed American cities and tastes and pulled the Democratic Party to the right are a dying breed.

Marjane Satrapi’s inimitable art encompassed revolution and war, education and ideology, repression and rebellion.

Candice Wuehle’s novel Ultranatural lays bare the alienated labor behind the catchy hits and sequined costumes.

In her memoir Ghost Stories, grief is a form of knowledge—anguished and fragmentary, but knowledge nonetheless.

New editions of his “hard” novels show an obsession with furtive desires and misdeeds—and an uncanny obliviousness to the horrors under his nose.

A new book makes the case for engaging with the anniversary on your own terms and taking your own meaning from it.

A conversation with Jasper Craven about military education, abuse, and the uses of religion as a form of control.

In scrutinizing our relationship with the natural world, his classic works helped us to better understand ourselves.

Her characters grapple with mean, stubborn, and lonely parents, and work out how to grow old without turning into them.

A lightly spoiler-filled conversation with the author about his new novel, Vigil, climate change, and redemption.

Elisa Tamarkin retraces her father’s work in Vietnam, and untangles the relationship of American newspaper business to the American war machine.

Julia Cooke’s biography of three writers illuminates the profound complexity of women’s lives without apologizing, justifying, or moralizing.

Trevor Jackson traces the “dumb, inhuman logic” of endless growth over hundreds of years, and gestures at a better world.

Small, local growers have long been hailed as the way to improve food. But large companies have the scale to make a bigger impact.

Cuts in publishing and book reviewing imperil the future of narrative nonfiction, and our understanding of the world around us.

Virginia Woolf put forward an enduring vision of women with the space and financial stability to write. But it’s also a sad vision—of isolated writers, cut off from peers or mentors.

Author William Hartung explains why the United States seems perpetually drawn into conflict.

Namwali Serpell’s new book embraces the uneasy, unexpected, and defiant elements of her life and work.

Malcolm Cowley championed Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey—and elevated the status of American writing.